strat 3.0

[Huey Newton]

I will do my best to sum up strat 3.0 and I encourage others to add on to this as well.

Started out great as EU/NA were split along a metaphorical 38th parallel.
Several clans claimed fiefs, castles, cities etc. There was some overlapping of claims, some fun forum drama but for the most part things were smoothed out.
Strat finally got rolling, but everything was extremely slow and expensive (not necessarily a bad thing), for the first couple weeks there were hardly any real battles, soon came pitchforks and rocks, later falchions and hor bows, and presently MW simple swords and MW horn bows. Archery is more important in strat than it ever has been. Not because it was buffed or anything like that, but because of its cost-efficiency. Cavalry never had its chance to shine up to this point. Too expensive and quite the opposite of archery, not cost-effective at all.
On top of these issues, several high profile/addicting games came out in the past few months.
Battlefield 3
Skyrim
SDGO
Nord Invasion (Warband Mod)
SWTOR

These games have been drawing several players (including myself) from cRPG and strat
Understand my position, mount and blade warband is literally the only videogame i've played in the past 17 months, with maybe 3-4 days total of killing floor. Maybe playing another well designed game is causing me to have a relapse of enjoyment.
Having fun in another game is making me hate cRPG and strat even more.

Opinion:
I hate cRPG for the fact that,
My horse is either 2 shot by bows, crossbows or 1 shot by javelins. My laptop was not designed for gaming in any way, causing very low fps all the time (10-50). Losing pisses me off, i'm not afraid to admit it. I'm a very competitive person, who would I be kidding if I said i'm a casual and only play for fun. It seems the more I play and the better I get, the less fun I have and I find myself playing this game to win. Which is naturally made fun of in internet communities I assume. A try hard you could call me.

I hate strat for the fact that,
It's a war game simulation, and majority of clans just don't do anything. That's not me trying to low blow the EU community, its just a fact. How many major conflicts have the EU side of the map had? (besides the mercs getting jumped recently)
Not very many.
I also understand the opinion of many that "EU are able to work differences out work together to trade and live peacefully. That is a fine skill in real life however, this isn't real life, this is a war game. The way I was raised, you play war games to kill people and come out on top. (or is that american media and culture rubbing off on me?)
Regardless, strat is very buggy still, dominated by archery, cavalry unplayable, generally frustrating and stressful.
The same as it was in strat 1.0 when Cavalieres/ Grubby Serfs were attacked by the nordmen,
The same as it was during the great FCC/Merc war.

What am I getting at? I'm not so sure myself, I'm just typing and rambling because this has been on my mind for a while, yet i've been busy with other RL shit.


I just realized this started off as me summing up strat 3.0 and somehow turned into why i'm starting to hate cRPG and Strat.
(Correlation perhaps)

[Daniel]

Call me crazy but I think Huey just put together a comprehensive thought.

Impressive.

[Keshian]

Call me crazy but I think Huey just put together a comprehensive thought.

Impressive.

Don't make fun of him, he's new.

And honestly, if Strat 3.0 had just been Strat 2.0 with no changes implemented, just a reset, I would have had a lot more fun.  There needs to be a serious look taken by developers at what they want - when was the last time you asked yourself, "will this actually be fun"?  Because a lot of changes were meant for the best but ended up only making the game tedious, slower, and more boring and time-consuming, with little to call fun.

[Overdriven]

- Strat has been bug ridden with very slow fixes.
- Equipment is far to expensive so strat battles are very boring in the majority of cases.
- Crap xp/gold from defending for AI villages, leading to almost 0 contest for most villages.
- Carebear alliances
- Map far to small for number of clans
- Lots of new, shiny, more enjoyable games released
- Ping at uni has been awful so haven't been able to play much crpg/strat this time round.

These are the main factors that have put me off strat this time round. I've just lost all interest in strat. When it comes to the point where an all cav clan, with hefty crafting discounts on rounceys, can barely produces horses for each of it's members to get one for one ticket in battle, then strat loses all point for me. It's taken till probably 1 week ago for us to produce horses on any large scale that can be used in a decent sized battle. Otherwise we've only ever had about 20 horses at most.

Equipment is simply to expensive, and that's probably the number one reason why I've lost interest.

Strat 2.0 was more fun in every aspect. Even with all the glitching the system from various clans. I personally would have preferred to carry on with strat 2.0 with clans breaking every aspect of it than play in strat 3.0.

[Reinhardt]

Hmmm. Just a random thought, but I think that now since there are less troops and gold to go around, larger factions have even more of an advantage. I mean, it's not really how you use the tickets so long as another faction has 20 troops for every 1 of yours.

[Draggon]

It's a war game simulation, and majority of clans just don't do anything. That's not me trying to low blow the EU community, its just a fact. How many major conflicts have the EU side of the map had? (besides the mercs getting jumped recently)
Not very many.
I also understand the opinion of many that "EU are able to work differences out work together to trade and live peacefully. That is a fine skill in real life however, this isn't real life, this is a war game. The way I was raised, you play war games to kill people and come out on top. (or is that american media and culture rubbing off on me?)

Truer words were never spoken.
Strat has become citizens Role Playing Gayness.  (Muahahah)
Can you imagine playing Risk and everyone around the table just holds hands and 'lives peaceably?'  Or during a chess match one side says, 'well I coulda checkmated you but I'd rather just have an alliance.'

Bottom line is, and the truth may sting, but Factions are for the most part too afraid to stand on their own two feet without these massive and ridonculous carebear alliances.  There would be alot more battles and alot more fun without that. 

There's only one way I know of that would put an end to most of that bs...

Did any of you play the old Abyss server back in the days of UO?  Some of the most fun ever.  What they did was, rather than the usual guilds vs guilds vs guilds vs guilds dynamic, they created 8 pre-formed  Factions, and you could join any one you wanted while still being a member of your guild.  And of course these 8 Factions were constantly at war in a huge 8-way CTF + Siege type struggle.

Something like this could be implemented into Strat where everyone kept their own tags, their own clans, yet joined one of x number of pre-formed Factions.  Lets say there were 10, or however many.  By some means of masterful coding, the factions would start out semi-evenly.  Then of course through the course of war some factions would begin to dwindle until you have the final victor.

It would work.  I've seen it in action.  Only question is whether or not the community, chadz, Donkeycrew, etc, would go for it.

[Garem]

I haven't decided definitively or not whether the "pre-set factions" is a good idea or not. Nobody seems to have acknowledged exactly how you'd make THOSE factions balanced. How do you keep them the Rhodoks, Swadians, Nords, and Sarranids from ganging up on Vaegir and Khergit (which, territorially speaking, is pretty close to what happened this round)?

The only solution I can think of, and I'm not crazy about it, is to incentivize joining the meta-factions with fewer members with gold and experience bonuses, or maybe better odds or equipment* in Strategus. Anyways, just a thought.

*Side note: If ANYTHING in Strategus 3.0 needs an overhaul that is in the absolute control of the developers, it's the economic side of things. Players can be influenced to change their carebear ways by incentives or punishments, but ultimately that's on them. Now, I'm a big fan of Total War games and micromanagement is strangely kind of fun for me, but the level of tediousness required to manage Strategus is insane because you have to work with individuals, constantly, and it's often very hard to do that since few of us know each other in real life and many of us are very, very busy. Why not let players the option to give control of their actions to a clan manager? Just a checkbox, and whammy, the manager can now switch between characters under his control just like the cRPG website switches between a player's characters. Maybe the manager then forgoes the ability for his own character to work. Max number of other characters managed could be 10-20. God, that would be so insanely convenient, and be a major incentive for hiring non-clan mercs who want to be involved somewhat but don't want to monitor Strategus.

[Tomas_of_Miles]

(click to show/hide)

I haven't decided definitively or not whether the "pre-set factions" is a good idea or not. Nobody seems to have acknowledged exactly how you'd make THOSE factions balanced. How do you keep them the Rhodoks, Swadians, Nords, and Sarranids from ganging up on Vaegir and Khergit (which, territorially speaking, is pretty close to what happened this round)?

The only solution I can think of, and I'm not crazy about it, is to incentivize joining the meta-factions with fewer members with gold and experience bonuses, or maybe better odds or equipment* in Strategus. Anyways, just a thought.

*Side note: If ANYTHING in Strategus 3.0 needs an overhaul that is in the absolute control of the developers, it's the economic side of things. Players can be influenced to change their carebear ways by incentives or punishments, but ultimately that's on them. Now, I'm a big fan of Total War games and micromanagement is strangely kind of fun for me, but the level of tediousness required to manage Strategus is insane because you have to work with individuals, constantly, and it's often very hard to do that since few of us know each other in real life and many of us are very, very busy. Why not let players the option to give control of their actions to a clan manager? Just a checkbox, and whammy, the manager can now switch between characters under his control just like the cRPG website switches between a player's characters. Maybe the manager then forgoes the ability for his own character to work. Max number of other characters managed could be 10-20. God, that would be so insanely convenient, and be a major incentive for hiring non-clan mercs who want to be involved somewhat but don't want to monitor Strategus.

+1

I think it would be a great idea to concede control to faction leaders, if I knew I was going to be away from internet/computer for a while or at a critical moment, I would let my leader give me the orders.

[BADPLAYERold]

Hmmm. Just a random thought, but I think that now since there are less troops and gold to go around, larger factions have even more of an advantage. I mean, it's not really how you use the tickets so long as another faction has 20 troops for every 1 of yours.

This is very true, large factions also have more people playing cRPG (usually) and thus they can craft a larger range of equipment, often heirloomed.
It is even easier for bigger clans to pick on the little guys now.

[Sharky]

On carebears: can't see why people can't realize there aren't no real war (especially in EU side) because it's absolutely not convenient to do that for so many reasons. I'll try to summarize some of them:
-Griding troops and gold is soo expensive and time consuming, and you could loose your army in just one big bugged battle (like what happened to DRZ or FCC)
-Large symmetrical warfare is impossible because attackers can't attack (if you stuff more then 3k tickets you can't really loose with current rules)
-Arranging battles and stuff is difficult because there are less and less players interested in doing them (i guess because they aren't new anymore, too much time consuming without the scaling,and too demanding with all the pre joining ts requirements and not know if you will be taken or not often last minute)
-Also, many clans want to avoid wars until they got all their claims, and nobody even took a castle after 6 months so there are still plenty of them to take (and with current system it's probably not possible to take a town)

[Lepintoi]

By the time castles will be attacked no one will be bothered to defend them anymore. Any resistance on EU side will have GTX (me).
In my opinion a time limit on strat reset would force clans to act.

http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,22509.msg325465.html#msg325465

[Visconti]

I have to agree, while owning land and having a pretty color and name on the map is nice, strategus is just not fun this round. Too much grinding for little reward. Iv had maybe 5 decent battles out of the 54 battles i have been in, while the others i showed up to out of necessity, and have had no fun fighting with pitchforks and cudgels. Now that people are able to afford decent gear for battles, they just lose it all to some stupid bug! Not to mention there is always the threat of getting screwed over by the devs because they are bored, or feel like shooting fireballs at some peasants. Honestly have no idea what the point of this strategus was, as i have met very few people who actually enjoyed strat 3.0.

[RandomDude]

Well for my clan's part we did some fighting. Not as much as I'd like but mostly we were grinding to get a big enough army + gold to take and hold a fief.

We had some fights with neutrals, acre and 22nd. We couldnt really fight more than we did and be left with any force at all.

Just losing one army (200+) men would slow us down a lot.

I would like to see more fighting between clans too, especially the larger clans but they have their own reasons not to I guess. Maybe they're saving to take castles/towns etc.

[Gristle]

It simply takes too much time and effort to properly gear up an army, only to lose most of what you just made in one battle. War is no longer profitable or fun.

During the summer, when chadz apparently had plenty of free time, there would be at least 1 bug fix every week. The developers were active, more vocal than usual, and times were great. Now it's winter, and although chadz stopped playing Skyrim weeks ago, we are still desperately waiting for major updates.

[MrShine]

I think a fundamental issue with crafting is right now it's not really worth it to spend the time and gold to craft most of the items you have available.  I mean, I can craft a bunch of awesome stuff, but when it costs 10x what it takes for some of the cheap weaponry to craft it just isn't worthwhile.

I agree a big problem right now is everything is just too expensive.  It takes way too long to assemble enough gold for a 'good' loadout for an army and by the time you do that you could have funded 5 similarly sized army with weaker gear that would probably have been more effective in the long run.

In short the economy is borked for strat.